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Gift cards have once again caused quite a headache for retailers, as cyber criminals are using a botnet to break into and steal cash from money-loaded gift cards provided by major retailers around the globe. Dubbed GiftGhostBot , the new botnet specialized in gift card fraud is an advanced persistent bot (APB) that has been spotted in the wild by cyber security firm Distil Networks. GiftGhostBot has been seen attacking almost 1,000 websites worldwide and defrauding legitimate consumers of the money loaded on gift cards since Distil detected the attack late last month. According to the security firm, any website – from luxury retailers, supermarkets to coffee distributors – that allow their customers to buy products with gift cards could be targeted by the botnet. Operators of the GiftGhostBot botnet launch brute-force attacks against retailer's website to check potential gift card account numbers at a rate of about 1.7 Million numbers per hour, and request the balance f

Google announced its plans to punish Symantec by gradually distrusting its SSL certificates after the company was caught improperly issuing 30,000 Extended Validation (EV) certificates over the past few years. The Extended Validation (EV) status of all certificates issued by Symantec-owned certificate authorities will no longer be recognized by the Chrome browser for at least a year until Symantec fixes its certificate issuance processes so that it can be trusted again. Extended validation certificates are supposed to provide the highest level of trust and authentication, where before issuing a certificate, Certificate Authority must verify the requesting entity's legal existence and identity. The move came into effect immediately after Ryan Sleevi, a software engineer on the Google Chrome team, made this announcement on Thursday in an online forum . "This is also coupled with a series of failures following the previous set of misissued certificates from Symantec, c

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

The ISPs can now sell certain sensitive data like your browsing history without permission, thanks to the US Senate. The US Senate on Wednesday voted, with 50 Republicans for it and 48 Democrats against, to roll back a set of broadband privacy regulations passed by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) last year when it was under Democratic leadership. In October, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that ISPs would need to get consumers' explicit consent before being allowed to sell their web browsing data to the advertisers or other big data companies. Before the new rules could take effect on March 2, the President Trump's newly appointed FCC chairman Ajit Pai temporarily put a hold on these new privacy rules. Ajit Pai argued that the rules, which are regulated by FTC, unfairly favored companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, who have the ability to collect more data than ISPs and thus dominate digital advertising. "All actors in the online

As part of its " Vault 7 " series, Wikileaks — the popular whistle-blowing platform — has just released another batch of classified documents focused on exploits and hacking techniques the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) designed to target Apple MacOS and iOS devices. Dubbed " Dark Matter ," the leak uncovers macOS vulnerabilities and attack vectors developed by a special division of the CIA called Embedded Development Branch (EDB) – the same branch that created ' Weeping Angel ' attack – and focused specifically on hacking Mac and iOS firmware. CIA Infects Apple Devices With Unremovable Malware The newly released documents revealed that CIA had also been targeting the iPhone since 2008. The Agency has created a malware that is specially designed to infect Apple firmware in a way that the infection remains active on MacOS and iOS devices even if the operating system has been re-installed. According to Wikileaks, the released documents also gives a c

A Russian man accused of developing and distributing the Citadel Banking Trojan , which infected nearly 11 Million computers globally and caused over $500 Million in losses, has finally pleaded guilty to charges of computer fraud. Mark Vartanyan, 29, who was very well known as " Kolypto ," pleaded guilty in an Atlanta courtroom on Monday to charges related to computer fraud and is now co-operating with federal prosecutors in return for a reduced sentence of no more than five years in prison. Vartanyan, a native of Moscow, was arrested in Norway in October 2014 and extradited to the United States in December last year. He was involved in the development, improvement, maintenance and distribution of the nasty Citadel Trojan. "This successful extradition is yet another example of how cooperation among international law enforcement partners can be used to disrupt and dismantle global cyber syndicates," said U.S. Attorney John Horn. "This defendant's